Vera Mutafchieva. Albena Hranova

ALBENA HRANOVA historiography and literature on social constructing of historical concepts and grand narratives in Bulgarian culture ХIХ and ХХ century volume I literature. historiography. sociology: theories, crises, cases PROSVETA PUBL., SOFIA 2011 I dedicate this work to my colleagues and friends – historians, sociologists, culturologists, philosophers, who came along when I was crossing and observing disciplinary boundaries – with love and gratitude. © Albena Vladimirova Hranova, 2011 © Veselin Kostadinov Pramatarov – graphical design, 2011 © Prosveta – AD, all rights reserved ISBN 978–954–01–2570–1 477 ADDENDUM HISTORY AND NOVELISTIC GENEALOGIES: VERA MUTAFCHIEVA In Lieu of Introduction: Historiography and Literature as Choice Policies ... whether I moved into Cem, or vice versa … NonFables, Book III: 150 In the last lines of the last fourth book of Vera Mutafchieva’s memoir series NonFables 213 she writes: “... I realize that I lived wonderfully – on the border between reality and fiction. Which I wish you too. And if there is something wrong – I am sorry!” (NonFables, IV: 294). Well, we would immediately say that there really is something – and in this case it is a deliberate ambiguity about the where the border passes, the what it divides, the where and what are those epistemological and social checkpoints through which it can be crossed. Saying goodbye, Vera Mutafchieva smiles and hides in the cliché about the border, leaving the reader the choice whether to live in the cliché or to reconstruct the border, which only through its reconstruction would permit to be crossed. The first book of NonFables begins without an explanatory preface and in a startlingly fictional way – witness verb forms write events before the birth of the witness: “Mom and Dad got engaged in October 1927. And the wedding was postponed for the next summer vacation” (NonFables I: 5). The memoir series starts with something that can be anything but a memoir. 213 Mutafchieva, Vera. NonFables. Books I–III. NonFables. Book IV. Sofia: Anubis, 2000–2005. 478 Further, the reader forgets that the beginning has refuted his genre expectations, or attributes it to stylistic causes and effects; reassures that witness forms are riveted to an already existing biographical entity that substantiates them; fluent prefaces emerge as well, growing from the second to the fourth book; political history also invades, along with its ability and weakness to capture human life, to design, argue, and explain it. The gap between genre and language has closed, but the memory of reading holds it in as a vague hint. Then the memoir goes its due course, not least because the reader of Vera Mutafchieva is accustomed to her fictional history being the exact opposite. He is accustomed to the plot of history being made by a complex and dense mosaic of various third-person human lives (Chronicle of the Troubled Time, 1965–1966) or by the encounter of various I-stories (The Cem Case, 1967; Me, Anna Komnene, 1991), and not from a self- conscious autobiography like in NonFables, going through various changing stages of life and points of view. Moreover, the self-consciousness of the life written on its own behalf has more to hide than to reveal, as we know from the Book of Sophronius, 1978. In this sense, the memoir series can very easily deceive the lover of pure genre forms, if he underestimated his deceived expectation in the opening lines as he reads the witness forms of the events of the still unborn woman. The series actually helps the reader by insisting on thematizing the difference between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ to the point of closing both between different covers, volumes and titles. In the three NonFables (“Bivalitsi”) fiction is only at the level of the allegories comprehended, only in the dependence of the text on the human occasions, reasons and intentions of its author. The creative stories, the readers’ and critics’ reactions, the political vicissitudes of the texts are closed in the fourth volume with a changed title, under the clearly dissecting NonFables (“Ne/Bivalitsi”). Science, the biographical life of the professional historian, the articles and monographs of scientists are in the Bivalitsi, and art is in the Ne/Bivalitsi*. In addition to clarity in composition, this traditional, classical classification also contains, of course, ideologies - it works for the memoir genre, drawing a “non” to being in a world long considered autonomous. By the way, the titles themselves undermine this clichéd division, very characteristic of the time when Vera Mutafchieva decided to take up both crafts of the language identically and institutionally. The neologism “bivalitsi” is made by removing a prefix, but it could mean nothing if – like any neologism – it does not preserve the semantic memory of the dictionary mother-word, i.e. keeps the reading of the deleted “non”. “Ne/Bivalitsi” does * Nebivalitsi = nonfables is an old word established in the language, composed of the negation "ne" and the non-existent word "bivalitsa", which could be thought of as a noun derived from the modal verb "bivam" = may, occur, exist, be. – Note of the translator. 479 not completely return the tradition of the dictionary, but puts the dash, which is very similar to the already crossed fence between the meanings. The question, however, is what identities and affiliations of the text are exchanged and replaced in the constant wandering across the border. In an interview of Emy Baruch with Vera Mutafchieva, given at the time of writing NonFables, the interviewer proceeds from the classical premise that historiography is a place of reality and truth, and literature – of myths and fiction; that intuition is for the writer and analysis is for the historian. However, Vera Mutafchieva’s answer completely calmly exchanges the places and their contents: “– Are the writer’s intuitions or the historian’s analysis a more reliable starting point for looking ahead? The writer creates the myths, the historian refutes them… – ... In your opinion, the writer created the myths, and the historian refuted them. This would be the case if both the historian and the writer acted in a laboratory setting, even better in an airless environment. If they themselves were tailored to an exact drawing. But a large number of facts refute your statement: too often the writer sets about demythologizing history, while the historian contributes not only to the preservation but also to the creation of myths. It all depends on the presumed concept in one or the other type of work, as well as the nature of the artists... As a general rule, myths are compensation for the poor self-esteem of a society, but also the result of its excessive self-esteem. The myth does not resist one thing, it appears to me: thrashing, thrashing, thrashing” (Mutafchieva, V. 2004: 321–323). This answer, in fact, flatly refuses to reflect on historiography and literature in the ‘field’ regime. Differences are not a function of their action, they are in the ‘presumed concept’ of the writer, either of historiography or of literature. For Vera Mutafchieva, these are nothing more than genre differences, each of which can perform the functions of the other in either mythologizing or demythologizing. Yet the existing preconditions and prejudices about their fundamental difference are not insignificant at all, because they allow cultural-historical mimicry in the very gesture of the demythologizing action. They allow it to ‘hide’ in the old cultural identity of the other field; or to disguise itself as the other one, and thence to carry out its demythologizing action without radicalism and revolutionary assertion, but with sufficient consistent social perseverance in carrying out his suggestions. This means, among other things, that it is in this attitude that the differences between the fields are preserved, and sometimes more strictly than it seems at first glance. Because the ‘presumed concept’ of the person writing definitely chooses in each case the genre format through which to carry out his interpretive moves; and 480 this choice, clearly or mutedly, always carries within itself the very alternatives from which to choose. The conceptual activity of the writer is always present, whether the literature or the historiography will be intended as a subject of this activity for each individual case. Therefore, depending on the chosen genre subject of this conceptual activity – historiography or literature in their always maintained connection – we will further talk about Vera Mutafchieva’s aesthetics of knowledge or romance of commentary. However, there are also formats in which the genre picture of conceptual activity is blunted. Thus appear, as literary critics call them, the ‘essayistic deviations’ in our historian’s novels, or plainly ‘essayistic novels’ or even ‘genre-indeterminate novels’, such as The Last Shishmanides (1969) or A Personage Impossible. Rakovski’s Youth (1983). The difficulty in reconstructing the ‘presumed concept’, however, is not in the formulation of the genre (‘essay’ in this case is a saving-compensatory and in this sense not quite inaccurate name), but in the fact that the conceptual activity of Vera Mutafchieva in different cases is untraceable in clear genre and thematic typologies. That is, the when of one field turning out to be an instrument for deconstruction of the other field and at exactly which points of the subject matter and interpretation this happens, cannot be said at once, and no such observation would have – even if only for the work of Vera Mutafchieva – wide enough theoretical validity. For the time being, we will give only some easily observable preliminary examples, which also carry clear-cut political frameworks for the choice between the roles of historiography and literature. Even if the 1960s return nationalism to historiography and encourage the new flowering of the historical novel, Vera Mutafchieva (unlike other authors during this period) does not share any affiliation to the model in which nationalism and genre are impossible without each other – the historical novel of the right from the interwar period.

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